The first computer I ever got to use was a Taiwanese (in those days that was a bad word) clone of the Apple II+ which my dad bought in 1982. It looked very much like this one:
This computer was a "V.S.C. 2" (I guess because it displayed "V.S.C. 2" on the screen, but the real Apple II displayed "Apple II" on booting). In many ways it was "superior" to the
real Apple II+ because it had
lowercase letters built-in. Apparently, the Apple's of the era didn't have lowercase letter capability until the early- to mid-1980's. This computer had a 1.023 MHz processor, 48KB of RAM, and could display text at 40x24, a low-resolution "graphics" mode with 40x40 pixels (!) and a high-resolution graphics mode with 280x192 pixels in 8 colors.
Since we didn't have a monitor at that time, we used our 12" Sony black-and-white TV (made in the Philippines by Solid Corporation, which is now the luckless Destiny Cable). The computer came with a RF modulator, very familiar to the Nintendo Family Computer crowd, which let you view the 40-column text on the TV. Since it was a black-and-white TV, I just had to imagine those 8 colors in high-resolution mode.
Later on we got a Taxan green monitor, with a composite NTSC input. That thing was actually compatible with a VHS machine's output! I even got to use that ancient Taxan (it had about ten little potentiometers at the back to adjust various parameters, what's now done with On-Screen Display or OSD menus) on my first PC, which was an XT clone with a full-length, absolutely enormous CGA video card.
"Mass storage" was via an external, separate 5.25" floppy disk drive. This was a "single-sided" drive meaning it had only one read/write head. So you could actually eject the floppy disk,
flip it upside down, and use the other side of the floppy disk as well!
In those days you could buy a "single-sided" or a "double-sided" floppy disk. The double-sided variety was more expensive. So what my dad did was buy the single-sided disks, cut a notch on the left side with a razor blade (the write-enable notch) and
voila, double-sided floppy disk. Apparently the double-sided disks got QA'ed for both sides, while the single-sided ones only got QA for one side. But they all had magnetic coatings on both sides.
Write protection was done by putting some opaque tape (black electrical tape worked quite well) over the write-enable notch.
Back then there were a few "popular" brands of floppy disks: the expensive ones were Verbatim and 3M, while the cheap ones were made in Korea (a bad word in the early- to mid-1980's) and were branded SKC. We had lots of SKC disks, but the valuable software (like the System Master diskette, which you needed to
format new disks) were on 3M disks.
Side note: the 5.25" disks were called
diskettes or "small disks" because there was a larger variety of floppy disk that was popular back then: the 8" floppy disk. These disks were the size of a 45rpm record and held an unimaginably vast amount of data: 400KB per side, I think (this is all from memory).
Our computer had Applesoft BASIC in ROM. This was one of Bill's earlier efforts. It also had a sort-of shell and DOS (the "System Master" disk). You could run a BASIC program off the disk by typing
RUN MYPROGRAM at the BASIC prompt. Or, you could run a machine-language program off the disk by typing
BRUN MYPROGRAM.
To look at the contents of the disk, you would type
CATALOG. It reminds me of another place, in much more recent memory, where I get to use the catalog (
SELECT * FROM CAT).
One time, rats got into the computer and used it as a latrine. As a result, one bank of the RAM went out, leaving my brother and me with 32KB of RAM. That wasn't enough to run games like Cannonball Blitz. In fact the
only game we had that could run in 32KB was Sabotage (man the gun, shoot at helicopters and parachutists). I got really good at Sabotage. My brother was five or six at the time, he was in charge of the Space Bar (firing button) while I steered the turret with the left- and right-arrow keys.
Needless to say, the "V.S.C. 2" was extremely slow. When I first got to use an IBM PC XT clone at my dad's office in 1985, I was staggered by the differences: the "V.S.C. 2" had 48KB of RAM, versus 640KB for the XT clone. From the BASIC prompt, you could actually output precise frequency
tones on the XT,
SOUND 8000, 10 for example, whereas the Apple clone was only good for beeps (
PRINT CHR(7) to stick out a
BEL character) or mysterious clicks, which were invoked using the suitably-arcane
BZ = PEEK(-16336).
You could draw circles and stuff with the BASIC interpreter on the XT clone, whereas the Apple clone was limited to lines and polylines. Not to mention that "medium resolution" on the CGA card (320x200 with 4 colors) was better than "high resolution" on the Apple clone (280x192), not even mentioning the 640x200 high resolution mode of the CGA.
And the XT clone had a 4.77MHz processor ("turbo mode" at 10MHz, the chip was a NEC V20, not an Intel 8088) and had 16-bit registers. And a multiply instruction. Did I mention 16-bit registers? lots of 16-bit registers.
At that time, I thought that to get different
languages (other than BASIC) you needed special hardware. This was because Apple sold (and their imitators spawned) something called the 16K Language Card, which was an expansion card which added (duh..) 16KB of RAM to the system. That extra 16KB (for a whopping total of 64KB) enabled the machine to run either CP/M or the UCSD p-System, both of which provided wonders such as compilers and the famous word processor, WordStar.
Unfortunately for me, you needed more than the 16K Language Card to run these wonders: you also needed the 80-Column Card (so that you could display 80 columns of text). Since we didn't have the latter, no other languages for me.
You could imagine the delight and wonder engendered by the PC XT clone: with just a disk, you could have all these languages I had only
read about in books. I was like a kid in a candy store. Well, I
was a kid at the time.
Want Pascal? there was Philippe Kahn's masterpiece, Turbo Pascal 3.0 on a
single 360KB disk! want a fast BASIC? Robert Zale's Turbo BASIC 1.0 to the rescue (circa 1987)!
Come to think of it, Turbo BASIC spoiled my programming evolution because it was fast enough for most things, so I didn't feel the need to migrate to C for another two or three years, after a detour into Pascal, whose set functionality seemed ideal for implementing inventories in the adventure games I was so fond of at the time.
Of course, once I had grown past the slowness of BASIC and Pascal, what more could one ask for but Turbo C 2.0 (along with the yellow Reference Manual reprint).
I did get to learn and use Microsoft Multiplan on our Apple clone, which I'm sure very few have heard of. This was Microsoft's first effort in the spreadsheet business, many, many years before Excel.
The Apple II+ and its clones didn't have up- and down-arrows, making cursor navigation in spreadsheet programs (or even line-editing in the BASIC interpreter!) an interesting experience. It didn't have function keys or a numeric keypad, either. Come to think of it, cursor navigation in Multiplan was very much like how we navigate in UNIX
vi. On a terminal with no (or non-working) arrow keys, like the Sun console.
Eventually I thought that I needed to learn 6502 assembly language, so I could squeeze some more speed out of the antiquated Apple II clone (this was around 1985 or 1986, I was ten or eleven at the time).
Imagine my surprise and disgust when I discovered that the 6502 has
one general purpose register, called the Accumulator, and two semi-general purpose registers, the X and Y registers if I recall correctly. These registers were an amazing
8 bits wide. There was no multiply or divide instruction. So you needed to do repeated addition or shifts. The 6502 assembly language book I had, didn't explain Booth's algorithm, so the explanation of how to do multiplication was haphazard at best.
One of the really neat tricks that I miss about that ancient Apple II clone was the game port. Steve Wozniak implemented the Apple game port's analog inputs using a (gasp) 556 dual-timer circuit. Basically the game port could sense four digital inputs (the firing buttons, I don't think there even was debounce circuitry) and two resistive inputs (the X- and Y-axes of the joystick).
It was quite amusing to wire a variable resistor to the analog input. Two long pieces of #22 solid wire were fine; the game port was a simple 16-pin DIP socket on the motherboard, and you could stick one end of the solid wire right in the appropriate pin socket on the connector.
Then, connect a long rod (one of those wooden rulers with a hole in the end would do) to the shaft of the potentiometer, attach a weight to the other end of the ruler, and
voila, you have a pendulum. Some BASIC software to read the game port, and you could graph on the screen, in real time,
damped mechanical oscillation.
I can't help but remember how much fun I had on that ancient piece of hardware. I learned the periodic table of the elements on that thing. I programmed adventure games (in BASIC!) on that thing. I tried to make an oscilloscope too, because my understanding of how the game port analog inputs worked was flawed (at the time, I thought there were real A/D converters in there).
And all that with 1 MHz, 48KB of RAM, 40 columns of text, and perhaps 100KB of disk storage on each side of those SKC floppy disks.
